Am I splitting hairs by asking can components be said to be reliable? I might have a car that's reliable but would I say that the tires were? I might be able to say that the tires could be relied on to work properly. In my best techno-ese then
Components having come into contact with XX can no longer be certain to function properly even if subsequently cleaned.

Am I splitting hairs by asking can components be said to be reliable? I might have a car that's reliable but would I say that the tires were? I might be able to say that the tires could be relied on to work properly. In my best techno-ese then
Components having come into contact with XX can no longer be certain to function properly even if subsequently cleaned.

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While I think that works perfectly too, we do talk about the reliability of components in a technical context (we even talk about the reliability of the trains we build , but we're not referring to whether they're on time or not, because we don't operate them, we just make them).